Frame of Reference

To illuminate—or to irritate?

In 2000, Abe Crystal, an undergraduate from Columbia, South Carolina, was enrolled in a writing class I teach at Princeton, and one of his assignments was to compose a profile of another student, whose name was Grainger David. This Grainger happened to be the undergraduate president of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s University Cottage Club and was as smoothly verbal and self-possessed as any of Fitzgerald’s characters, including Amory Blaine, of “This Side of Paradise.” In the profile, Abe Crystal mentioned, without amplification, that Grainger David had “sprezzatura.”

Sprezzatura? Of course, in this advanced age of the handheld vocabulary, everyone on earth knows what sprezzatura means, but in 2000 I had no idea, and I reached for an Italian dictionary. Nothing. I looked in another Italian dictionary. Nothing. I looked in Web II—Webster’s unabridged New International Dictionary, Second Edition. Niente. I picked up the phone and called my daughter Martha, who has lived in Italy and co-translated John Paul II’s “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” into English from the Vatican’s Italian.

Her credentials notwithstanding, Martha was no help.

I tried my daughter Sarah, a professor of art and architectural history at Emory, whose specialty is Baroque Rome. Her answering machine was as helpful as Martha.

That evening, I happened to attend a crowded reception at the New York Public Library with my daughter Jenny, the other translator of the Pope’s book, and her husband, Luca Passaleva, who was born, raised, and educated in Florence. “Hey, Luc. What is the meaning of ‘sprezzatura’?”

Luca: “I don’t know. Ask Jenny.”

Jenny: “I don’t know, but that couple over there might know. He’s in the Italian consulate.”

Consul: “Ask my wife. She is literary, I am not.”

Signora: “I’m very sorry. I have no idea.”

Back in Princeton the next day, I had a scheduled story conference with Abe Crystal, his profile of Grainger David on the desk in front of us. With my index finger touching “sprezzatura,” I said, “Abe, what the hell is this?”

Abe said he had picked up the word in Castiglione’s “The Courtier,” from 1528. “It means effortless grace, all easy, doing something cool without apparent effort.”

Soon after he left, I called Sarah again, and she picked up. She said Abe had it right, but the word “nonchalance” should be added to his definition. She said that Raphael carried the ideal of sprezzatura into painting. “He painted his friend Baldassare Castiglione as the ideal courtier, the embodiment of sprezzatura. It’s now in the Louvre.”

Robert Bingham, my editor at The New Yorker for sixteen years, had a florescent, not to mention distinguished, mustache. In some piece or other, early on, I said of a person I was writing about that he had a “sincere” mustache. This brought Bingham, manuscript in hand, out of his office and down the hall to mine, as I had hoped it would. A sincere mustache, Mr. McPhee, a sincere mustache? What does that mean? Was I implying that it is possible to have an insincere mustache?

I said I could not imagine anything said more plainly.

The mustache made it into the magazine and caused me to feel self-established as The New Yorker’s nonfiction mustache specialist. Across time, someone came along who had “a no-nonsense mustache,” and a Great Lakes ship captain who had “a gyroscopic mustache,” and a North Woodsman who had “a timber-cruiser’s guileless mustache.” A family practitioner in Maine had “an analgesic mustache,” another doctor “a soothing mustache,” and another a mustache that “seems medical, in that it spreads flat beyond the corners of his mouth and suggests no prognosis, positive or negative.”

Writing has to be fun at least once in a pale blue moon.

Dodge had a great deal more hair on his upper lip than elsewhere on his head. With his grand odobene mustache he had everything but the tusks. . . . His words filtered softly through the Guinness Book mustache. It was really a sight to see, like a barrel on his lip.

Inevitably, all this led to Andrew Lawson. Andrew Lawson? The great Scottish-born Andrew Lawson, structural geologist, University of California, Berkeley, who named—perhaps eponymously—the San Andreas Fault. Andrew Lawson was lowered in a bucket into a caisson in San Francisco Bay in order to decide if the south pier of the Golden Gate Bridge could be constructed where it is.

With his pure-white hair, his large frame, his tetragrammatonic mustache, Lawson personified Higher Authority.

Querying letters poured into The New Yorker’s office like water over the sides of a caisson. With utmost generosity, the writer Charles McGrath, then a young New Yorker editor, voluntarily answered them.

A tetragrammatonic anything and a term that seems to have stalled in the Italian Renaissance are points of reference that might just irritate, rather than illuminate, some readers. Make that most readers. The perpetrator is the writer. Mea culpa. Meanwhile, though, in a contrary way, we have come upon a topic of first importance in the making of a piece of writing: its frame of reference, the things and people you choose to allude to in order to advance its comprehensibility. Mention Beyoncé and everyone knows who she is. Mention Veronica Lake and you might as well be in the Quetico-Superior. Obviously, if you mention New York, you can count on most readers to know what that is and where. Mention Vernal Corners and you can’t. It’s upstate. What would you do with Scarsdale? Do you need to say where it is? Step van, Stanley Steamer, black-and-white unit, gooseneck trailer. If you know what a gooseneck trailer is, raise your hand.

One hand rises among thirty-two.

“Where are you from, Stacey?”

“Idaho.”

To sense the composite nature of frames of reference, think of their incidental aftermath, think of some old ones as they have moved through time, eventually forming distinct strata in history. At the University of Cambridge, academic supervisors in English literature would hand you a photocopy of an unidentified swatch of prose or poetry and ask you to say in what decade of what century it was written. This custom is called dating and is not as difficult as you might imagine. A useful comparison is to the science of geochronology, which I once tried to explain with this description:

Imagine an E. L. Doctorow novel in which Alfred Tennyson, William Tweed, Abner Doubleday, Jim Bridger, and Martha Jane Canary sit down to a dinner cooked by Rutherford B. Hayes. Geologists would call that a fossil assemblage. And, without further assistance from Doctorow, a geologist could quickly decide—as could anyone else—that the dinner must have occurred in the middle eighteen-seventies, because Canary was eighteen when the decade began, Tweed became extinct in 1878, and the biographies of the others do not argue with these limits.

Fossils were the isotopes of their time, and that is how, in the nineteenth century, the science developed the story it was telling. All this is only to show how frames of reference operate, how quickly they evolve from currency to obsolescence. The last thing I would ever suggest to young writers is that they consciously try to write for the ages. Oh, yik, disgusting. Nobody should ever be trying that. We should just be hoping that our pieces aren’t obsolete before the editor sees them. If you look for allusions and images that have some durability, your choices will stabilize your piece of writing. Don’t assume that everyone on earth has seen every movie you have seen. In the archives of ersatz references, that one is among the fattest folders. “This recalled the climb-out scene in ‘Deliverance.’ ” “That was like the ending of ‘Birdman of Alcatraz.’ ”

Here is a lively group pieced together by Sarah Boxer, writing in 2010 in The New York Review of Books about the artists Hedda Sterne and Saul Steinberg, who “knew all the New Yorker people, the writers and cartoonists and movie people—Charlie Addams, Cobean, William Steig, Peter Arno, Ian Frazier, Dwight Macdonald, Harold Rosenberg, E. B. White, Katharine White—and they all came to dinner.” That’s a fossil assemblage with a virus in it. Ian Frazier, in Hudson, Ohio, in the era of those dinners, was nine years old and younger.

Frames of reference are like the constellation of lights, some of them blinking, on an airliner descending toward an airport at night. You see the lights. They imply a structure you can’t see. Inside that frame of reference—those descending lights—is a big airplane with its flaps down expecting a runway.

You will never land smoothly on borrowed vividness. If you say someone looks like Tom Cruise—and you let it go at that—you are asking Tom Cruise to do your writing for you. Your description will fail when your reader doesn’t know who Tom Cruise is.

Who is Tom Ripley?

Dwight Garner, in the Times, 2010: “Castelli was a hard man to know. He had thousands of friends but few intimates. There was something elusive, shape-shifting, almost Tom Ripley-like about him.”

More scattered examples from not very bygone years:

John Leonard, Times Book Review, 2005, reviewing the Library of America’s collection of James Agee: “Who knows what marriage was, maybe musical electric chairs. Add it all up, tossing in macho rubbish about tomcatting and romantic beeswax about the agony of artistic creation, and what you don’t get is a grown-up. You get Rufus in Knoxville.”

Janet Maslin, the Times, 2008, reviewing “The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy,” by Robert Leleux: “Despite many obstacles, not least of them the danger of sounding like a would-be Augusten Burroughs, he has made her the centerpiece of a frantically giddy coming-of-age story.”

Maureen Dowd, the Times, 2008, on President emeritus William Jefferson Clinton: “Bill continues to howl at the moon. . . . He’s starting to make King Lear look like Ryan Seacrest.”

Joel Achenbach, in his wonderful book “Captured by Aliens” (1999), page 391: “There’s a nebula in space that looks like Abe Vigoda.”

Joel, as a college senior, was in my writing class in 1982. I keep trying. Also in “Captured by Aliens,” he produces this description of a professor at Tufts University: “He looks a bit like Gene Wilder, and has some of the same manic energy.” Gene Wilder? Search me. But nota bene: when Joel says “the same manic energy,” he is paying back much of the vividness he borrowed.

Enter Robert Wright, who was in the class four years earlier and has become an author who will take on subjects few would dare to confront, such as “The Evolution of God” in five hundred and seventy-six pages (2009). His first book (1988) was called “Three Scientists and Their Gods.” Chapter 19 begins this way: “The fact that Kenneth Boulding is a Quaker does not mean that he looks like the Quaker on the cartons of Quaker Oats.”

Bob does not seem interested in the future of that allusion, but he does go on to say:

As it turns out, there is a certain resemblance. Both men have shoulder-length, snow-white hair, blue eyes, and ruddy cheeks, and both have fundamentally sunny dispositions, smiling much or all of the time, respectively. There are differences, to be sure. Boulding’s hair is not as cottony as the Oats Quaker’s, and it falls less down and more back, skirting the tops of his ears along the way. And Boulding’s face is not soft and generic. His nose is jutting, and his eyes are deeply set and profoundly knowing.

Borrowed vividness may never have been so amply repaid.

Trevor Corson, in “The Zen of Fish,” 2007: “Salmon smell their way back to their birthplace. . . . As they head upriver they also undergo astonishing anatomical changes, not unlike Dr. David Banner’s transforming into the Incredible Hulk.”

Mark Singer, in “Somewhere in America,” 2004, paying off with so much interest that he has no debt: “Keys lacks the aura and demeanor of a politician. He’s sixty years old, pink-faced and freckled, with red hair that’s completing the transition to white. His drooping mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, plaid shirts, and blue jeans give him the overall look of a lean Wilford Brimley.”

Who Wilford Brimley? Who cares?

Ian Frazier, in The New Yorker, in 2014, attempting unsuccessfully to stay out of debtor’s prison: “Along with playing conga drums, she throws pots and is pursuing her second M.A., in experimental psychology with a focus on marine biology. She looks enough like the late Bea Arthur, the star of the nineteen-seventies sitcom ‘Maude,’ that it would be negligent not to say so.”

Frames of reference are grossly abused by writers and broadcasters of the punch-line school. We’re approaching the third decade of the twenty-first century and someone on Fox refers coyly to “a band called the Beatles and another called the Rolling Stones.” Y2kute. And NPR is reviewing the life of the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee: “He became close to a Georgetown neighbor—a young senator named John F. Kennedy.” Doesn’t that give you a shiver in the bones? Pure pallesthesia. Ta-da!

The columnist Frank Bruni, writing in the Times in 2014, said, “If you . . . want to feel much, much older, teach a college course. I’m doing that now . . . and hardly a class goes by when I don’t make an allusion that prompts my students to stare at me as if I just dropped in from the Paleozoic era. . . . I once brought up Vanessa Redgrave. Blank stares. Greta Garbo. Ditto. We were a few minutes into a discussion of an essay that repeatedly invoked Proust’s madeleine when I realized that almost none of the students understood what the madeleine signified or, for that matter, who this Proust fellow was.”

As it happened, Frank Bruni was at Princeton teaching in the same program I teach in—same classroom, same semester, different course, different day—and if I had felt “much, much older” I would have been back in the Archean Eon. Frank wrote that he was wondering if all of us are losing what he felicitously called our “collective vocabulary.” He asked, “Are common points of reference dwindling? Has the personal niche supplanted the public square?”

My answer would be that the collective vocabulary and common points of reference are not only dwindling now but have been for centuries. The dwindling may have become speedier, but it is an old and continuous condition. I am forever testing my students to see what works and does not work in pieces of varying vintage.

“Y2K—what does that mean?”

No one knew before the late nineties, and how long will the term last, if it isn’t gone already?

A couple of weeks before that spring semester began, I had been in Massachusetts collecting impressions for this project by testing the frame of reference in a piece of mine called “Elicitation,” which was soon to run in The New Yorker. Why Massachusetts? Because that’s where Brookline High School is and where Mary Burchenal’s senior English classes meet, and where Isobel McPhee, daughter of my daughter Laura, was one of her students. The “Elicitation” frame of reference consisted of about five dozen items running along the edges of seven thousand words.

“I would like to try that list on you. Raise your hand if you recognize these names and places: Woody Allen.”

Nineteen hands went up. Everybody present in the class that day was aware of Woody Allen. As we went through my list, nineteen hands went up also for Muhammad Ali, Time magazine, Hallmark cards, Denver, Mexico, Princeton University, Winston Churchill, “Hamlet,” and Toronto. So those perfect scores reached around about fifteen per cent of the frame.

In 1970, I went to Wimbledon on an assignment from Playboy. The idea was to spend the whole of the championships fortnight there and then write a montage of impressions, not only of the players but also of the place. The eventual piece was quite long, but its freestanding parts were short, like this one:

Hoad on Court 5, weathered and leonine, has come from Spain, where he lives on his tennis ranch in the plains of Andalusia. Technically, he is an old hero trying a comeback but, win or lose, with this crowd it is enough of a comeback that Hoad is here. There is tempestuous majesty in him, and people have congregated seven deep around his court just to feel the atmosphere there and to see him again. Hoad serves explosively, and the ball hits the fence behind his opponent without first intersecting the ground. His precision is off. The dead always rise slowly.

And so on to the end of Hoad, which was imminent. Meanwhile:

Smith, in a remote part of the grounds, is slowly extinguishing Jaime Fillol. . . . Laver is so far ahead that the match has long since become an exhibition.

The grounds were often more interesting than the matches, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club being such an index fossil from the nineteenth century.

The editor of the piece was the affable Arthur Kretchmer, who was soon to become Playboy’s editorial director, a position he held for thirty years. My conferences with him, always on the telephone, were light and without speed bumps as we made our way through the strawberries, the extinguishings, and the resurrections, until we came to the Members’ Enclosure.

In the Members’ Enclosure, on the Members’ Lawn, members and their guests are sitting under white parasols, consuming best-end-of-lamb salad and strawberries in Devonshire cream. Around them are pools of goldfish. The goldfish are rented from Harrods. The members are rented from the uppermost upper middle class. Wimbledon is the annual convention of this stratum of English society, starboard out, starboard home.

Arthur Kretchmer said, “What does that mean?”

Assuming a tone of faintest surprise, I explained that when English people went out to India during the Raj, they went in unairconditioned ships. The most expensive staterooms were on the port side, away from the debilitating sun. When they sailed westward home, the most expensive staterooms were on the starboard side, for the same reason. And that is the actual or apocryphal but nonetheless commonplace etymology of the word “posh.” Those people in the All England Members’ Enclosure were one below Ascot: starboard out, starboard home.

I didn’t have a stopwatch with which to time the length of the silence on the other end of the line. I do remember what Kretchmer eventually said. He said, “Maybe one reader in ten thousand would get that.”

I said, “Look: you have bought thirteen thousand words about Wimbledon with no other complaint. I beg you to keep it as it is for that one reader.”